When a computer business owner has decided to save money on IT sales leads by bringing inside sales in-house, the other big issue that needs to be consider is who’s going to coach and managed the inside marketing agents?  Once you have hired someone to make outbound calls for you then they will need to be coached and managed.  If the correct training is in place then someone in your company will have to coach your telemarketers to success.  Some important questions you might want to ask before moving forward would be, who is going to be the coach and what type of coaching will be required.  More importantly before you decide to in-source IT services marketing take a minute to consider what sort of time investment will be required. (more…)

Today there are more choices than every before for managed services providers to  conduct a low cost telemarketing campaign.  In fact, so many so that it can seem very alluring to try and spend less on your IT services marketing campaign. Many like this option so that they don’t risk too much capital trying to get their sales leads.  Does spending less for cold calling, so that you don’t risk losing money if it doesn’t work out really make sense?  What if you end up not getting any leads at all, not to mention any ROI?  There are so many horror stories out there from tech providers that waited over three months and didn’t end up getting any leads at all.  In fact, I often compare trying to pick a low budget IT call center to trying to walk through a mind field without blowing up!

What are some of the pitfalls to watch out for if you think that paying a phone center that specializes with marketing for managed services is just to expensive and finding a low cost solution might be a better option?  First you need to know who is going to actually be making the outbound calls on your behalf?  More importantly what type of training or experience do the agents have calling for computer consultants? (more…)

Blinders have a purpose in horse racing,  you don’t want the horse to get distracted by it’s surroundings and lose sight of the finish line.  In business sometimes having a degree of tunnel vision or a very narrow focus can be beneficial.  However, wearing blinders can be enormously detrimental if you’re a computer business owner that is conducting an IT lead generation campaign.  Having a narrow focus in this situation could cause you to miss several major factors happening around you that might play a serious roll in the outcome of your campaign.  One of the biggest factors that you should be always kept abreast of on the periphery, would be watching the competition.  What they are doing with their IT model and marketing can affect you. (more…)

No matter how good you are at delivering managed IT services you’re are always going to run into problems with customers, just like any other business.  As a computer business owner you could have problems with customers not being able to get through to the right marketing or IT person in time or perhaps your on-site technicians didn’t handle your clients in perfect manner etc…  Fires will erupt inevitable that you will have to put out quickly and try to extinguish before the customer gets so angry that it would take the wisdom and patients of angels to try and salvage your business relationship.  The larger risk is that one angry ‘former’ customer can spread their unhappiness just like a wild fire that could spread through out the local business community.  The last thing you want to do is pay for IT sales leads, fight to make sales and then watch as all your hard work just burns up because of bad customer service.  It’s imperative that you stop these fires before they get out of hand so the burning question is,  ”what is the right way to handle these situation?” (more…)

Your at your clients offices and you begin to feel the screws being used to negotiate you down in price.  This happened to me one time when I had a computer consultant that clearly wanted to utilize our IT services marketing program but really didn’t want to pay anywhere near the price we needed to fulfill the agreement!  I was asked to come down to their offices and was presented with a contact that had been signed by their president; but it had a price that was far below what we had discussed over the phone.  I pushed the agreement back and said that it wouldn’t be possible for me to sign that contract in it’s present form.  This computer business owner left the conference room and a few minutes came back with another marketing agreement that raised the price a littler higher but not by much.  When I was asked to sign this proposal, I again refused because it contained terms our company couldn’t operate under. Finally, this IT consultant pulled another agreement out of his coat pocket and handed it to me.  When I looked it over I could see that it contained all the terms and prices that I had asked for and that I would be able to provide the IT sales leads this agreeement commited me to.  Therefore, I promtly signed this agreement!

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MSP Telemarketing is Proud to announce sponsorship of the CompTIA Breakaway 2010 Channel Event.  We ran into some of the CompTIA employees at the MSPU Boot camp in Dallas, TX. After reviewing what CompTIA offers their members and the breakdown of who attends their Breakaway meetings, we couldn’t resist attending and sponsoring this event.

According to their stats 38% of the attendees will be the President, Owner or Partner of their firm.  So if you’re a vendor or are trying to get some good networking opportunities, then this will be a great event .  Also if you’re looking to get info on the latest IT services offerings then keep in mind that most of the Top IT vendors will be there. (more…)

In our last Blog we went over the numbers and showed why a computer business could afford to pay more for marketing calls to generate more IT appointments.  However, the big Question is why in the world would they want to pay more for it services marketing if they didn’t have to?

We were recently approached by a computer consultant who was using another telemarketing firm that was generating leads for a lower cost than what msp telemarketing was proposing.  My question to this technology services provider was, “ if you already getting sales leads  from the other firm at a lower cost, then why would you be contacting us?”

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Do you have a Trojan horse for selling IT?

Many thousands of years ago Odysseus is said in myths to have devised the stratagem that helped the Greeks defeat the Trojans after 10 years of war.  As legend has it, the Greek Heroes waited inside a Wooden Horse left on the beach.  The Trojans were deceived into taking this Decoy inside their impregnable walls.  Once inside the walls the Heroes were able to open the cities gates and allow the Greek army inside Troy.

In your computer business marketing battle for more managed services clients, are you Marshalling all of your resources and marketing wisdom, like you might if you were fighting  a real war? Or do you have a Trojan Horse in your arsenals that you can plant inside the gates of your computer services prospects?

A few years ago one of our clients was not having success closing some of the prospect that that we had lined up through our IT telemarketing. Many of them had gone through the whole proposal process but they hadn’t been able close any of them.  We proposed something like a Trojan Horse for our computer services marketing client. (more…)

When you show up to most technology sales leads meetings that were generated by IT telemarketing, then you are already up against a competitor that has a huge advantage.

The computer consultants that is already taking care of your prospect’s  technology is entrenched .  You have a sliver of a chance to unseat them.  One marketing computer services client that we have, calls their IT sales meetings  ’wedge’  marketing meetings.   The goal is to wedge yourself in and continue to widen the gap in your competitors weakness in the eyes of your prospect  (more…)

Are people either happy or mad?  Are things either black or white, or are there shades of grey.  Well, we are not going to start considering philosophy in our blogs but some understanding of human psyche might help while marketing computer services.

Understanding the psyche of your prospects is always a good idea, but it is especially important when you’re utilizing  IT sales leads or Technology Telemarketing leads.  This is because the reasoning behind why prospects have set IT sales leads becomes  more when scrutinized when you have a telemarketer pushing to get an appointment set up. (more…)